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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26861686">blood of the lazarus heart</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/BellumGerere/pseuds/BellumGerere'>BellumGerere</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>ruthless calculus [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Earthborn (Mass Effect), Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Past Character Death, Renegade Shepard (Mass Effect), Ruthless (Mass Effect)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 18:02:15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,319</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26861686</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/BellumGerere/pseuds/BellumGerere</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>There was no physical pain that could compare to the pain of watching his best friend die and knowing it was his fault. Seeing her alive had been more than he’d ever dared hope for, even once Project Lazarus had been explained to him. More than he had let himself want.</p><p>The problem is that he doesn’t know how to <i>tell</i> her any of that.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Jeff "Joker" Moreau &amp; Female Shepard</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>ruthless calculus [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1960111</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>blood of the lazarus heart</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>the tags probably provide enough of my shep's background so i won't say a lot here, but when i say renegade i mean Renegade. she is allowed exactly five (5) paragon interrupts/actions over the course of the whole series. she's also not very easy to get along with, which is why i wanted the first fic of hers i posted to be this one; my hc is that she and joker have known each other a Long time and he's one of very few people she feels she can speak freely with - probably the Only person at this point in me2. also wanted to mention that the self-harm is only very vaguely mentioned once, and nothing happens in-fic, but enough for me to tag for it, so please make sure you're comfortable with that before reading</p><p>i finished this as part of the trilogy week being run by omegastation on tumblr if anyone wants to check it out! there's a lot of cool things being made for it. also i'm very nervous about posting oc stuff pls be nice lmao -bel</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Cerberus straightened her teeth.</p><p>Joker can’t help but feel a little ridiculous when he realizes it’s the first thing he sees when he <em>sees</em> her—Celia Shepard, alive again after two fucking years of him having to live with the fact that she’d sacrificed herself for him—but her mouth opens for a moment in surprise before she snaps it shut, jaw clenched, and it’s enough to tell. It was one of the first things he’d noticed about her when they met, too, so maybe it made sense, in a cosmic sort of way. But soon enough the thought is overwhelmed by <em>it’s her</em> and <em>she’s here</em> and the scars on her face are red and angry, not like the old ones, but it doesn’t even matter if it means she’s alive.</p><p>They keep it quiet, though. He can tell she wants to say something more than what she does—part of him is proud for knowing her that well, for being the only one on the ship with the ability to read her—but she’s nothing if not professional. A little cold, even. It doesn’t throw him, it never has, and he can see the way that she looks at the new Normandy besides. Wistful, but at the same time—like she’s seen a ghost. In a way, he supposes that’s true.</p><p>She lets Jacob and Miranda walk her through the changes to the ship. Puts up a bit of a fuss about the AI, listens to their suggestions so quietly that he starts to get concerned, until she reminds them in no uncertain terms who runs the ship. It’s reassuring, the idea that even though so much about her is new, her abrasive personality hasn’t changed a bit. When they offer to escort her around the ship, though, he finally steps in, suggests that maybe he do it instead. She nods, casting suspicious glances at the others as he leads her to the elevator, but when the doors close behind him, he hits the button for her quarters instead of taking her down to engineering.</p><p>“We making a detour?” she asks, eyebrow raised, voice flat, and it’s so familiar that he almost fucking <em>cries</em>. Which is ridiculous in and of itself, he thinks. He doesn’t cry, and neither does she.</p><p>“No,” he says as the doors slide back open. He doesn’t wait for her to follow him towards her cabin, but after a moment she does, every step cautious, like it’s not only Cerberus, but the ship itself she doesn’t trust. “You’re going to get some sleep. And take a shower.”</p><p>She makes a noncommittal sound that he knows is a stand-in for a laugh before she comes to a stop only a few steps into her cabin. It can’t be what she’d anticipated—he remembers the captain’s quarters in the original Normandy, small and stark—and he watches her eyes dart around the space, taking it in. The door to the attached bathroom is open, too, and she pokes her head in long enough to get a sense for it before, still standing in the middle of the room, she starts to remove the hard outer pieces of her armor.</p><p>“This feels like a bribe.”</p><p>“It probably is. But it’s a pretty nice one.” He sits on the chair at her desk, tries to make himself comfortable. At her insistence, they’re not leaving for Omega until tomorrow, so they’ve got time—and the Illusive Man sent her running straight to Freedom’s Progress, anyway. The least they can do is let her get a few hours of sleep; if nothing else, it ensures she’ll be at her best. Even the great Commander Shepard isn’t infallible. Joker learned that the hard way—but she’s here now, and he doesn’t want to think about it any longer than he has to. “You know they can still hear you, right?”</p><p>“I know.” Her voice is barely audible over the thud of her armor hitting the floor, though, and he knows she’s just as aware of it as him. This is meant to be a break from her before she dives headfirst into recruiting, but no matter what they do, she’ll never really be alone. “I mean, after they reconstructed my entire body, I wasn’t expecting privacy.”</p><p>“Right?” Sarcasm is good. Sarcasm he can do. It’s almost too easy to fall back into this routine with her, the one where they talk around all the problems. They’ve been like this since she was in ICT, and if she’s really the same person that he was forced to leave behind, she won’t have any issue picking up where they left off. “I mean, they went so far as to straighten your teeth, why wouldn’t they make sure every inch of this room is bugged?”</p><p>Silence. Not even the sound of her armor, just a quiet that still feels so <em>loud</em> that it presses in on him. He’s about to get up, poke his head around the corner to see exactly what’s going on, when she strides past him and through the open bathroom door. She stops in front of the mirror. Stares. <em>Oh, fuck.</em></p><p>He does push himself upright, then, and follows her, halting a couple feet away. She looks at her reflection like it’s a stranger, and seeing her now, he can pick out the differences. They hadn’t bothered with matching her hair to the color she used to dye it, either, so it’s piled dark on top of her head—out of her line of sight, especially since she’d spent the past several hours with a helmet on. She almost looks better in some ways—less tired, at least—but he can already see where she’d been biting her bottom lip. A familiar sight, but one that looks out of place on her new face. “You didn’t know,” he says quietly.</p><p>She shakes her head. “I haven’t gotten to look in a mirror until now.”</p><p>It’s unexpectedly difficult to see her like this. Celia isn’t the kind of person to be uncertain about anything; her few moments of doubt are over as quickly as they come. He’s honored, almost, that he is the one she allows to see her this way, but—there shouldn’t have to be anyone. He watched her shove her emotions down for five years before her death, doing what the Alliance needed her to, and never once had any of them—except, perhaps, for Kaidan—stopped to think about what that must have been doing to her. Himself included. “CJ—”</p><p>“Don’t <em>CJ</em> me,” she snaps, and she won’t meet his eyes even in the mirror. “I’m fine.”</p><p>They’re both out of their depth with this emotional shit, he knows. It probably would have been easier to let Jacob and Miranda walk her through the ship, but—<em>fuck</em>, it’s been two years and not a day passed where she wasn’t the first thing he thought of when he woke up in the morning. He hadn’t even been able to sleep regularly for the first few months; her death played on repeat in his head. “No, you’re not,” he says, suddenly furious—with her, with himself, with Cerberus and this whole goddamned situation. “I know what fine looks like, and it’s never been you. Don’t lie to me.”</p><p>He—hadn’t meant it to come out that way, and when her eyes finally snap up to meet his, he worries that he’s taken it too far. But there’s no fight in her expression, in her posture, just a kind of resignation. She only replies “I think I should probably take that shower now” and motions for him to move out of the way. He does, with no small amount of reluctance, and watches as she passes him to grab clean clothes out of the closet—muttering something about how <em>of course</em> they know exactly what sizes she needs in everything—and doubles back.</p><p>She does pause, once, to glance over her shoulder at him. “No, I’m not fine,” she admits, quiet as she can. “But you don’t have anything to worry about right now. Freedom’s Progress was all mechs.” The door is sliding shut behind her before he can respond, and he lets out a breath, sitting down again in the world’s least comfortable desk chair and trying to resituate himself. There are more important things to be worried about than <em>that</em>, it’s true, but he knows all too well how easy it is to fall back into things you thought you’d left behind.</p><p>He’d told her the Alliance grounded him after her death, and that’s only part of the truth. The truth was that they had originally tried to give him lighter work—something not in the line of fire, more like what he’d been doing before the Normandy—but he couldn’t be at the helm without remembering that day, without feeling everything like it was fresh and new. After a few weeks of repeated attempts, he gave up. He grounded himself.</p><p>The nightmares had continued for long after that; if he’s being honest with himself, they’ve never stopped. Even the past week, since Cerberus had first contacted him, he wakes up afraid that he’ll look down and see her blood on his hands. In the dreams, they’re drenched in his own. He’d tried so hard to get the door to the escape pod open, even when he knew it was futile and would mean his own death, that when they’d found him it was with split skin on his knuckles and several broken fingers. It hadn’t mattered at the time. No physical pain could have compared. Seeing her alive had been more than he’d ever dared hope for, even once Project Lazarus had been explained to him. More than he had let himself want.</p><p>The problem is that he doesn’t know how to <em>tell</em> her any of that.</p><p>He hears the water stop before he expects to, followed by a string of quiet curses. She emerges only a few moments later, looking like she’s stepped right out of his wildest dreams and back into reality—but, then again, that’s what happened. He gets his best friend back, and she gets…he’s not quite sure. Biotics, probably. They <em>had</em> to have given her biotics, right?</p><p>The new scars extend across her arms, too, bright and red, and he can even see one crawling over her stomach in the space between the bottom of her tank and the top of her sweatpants. He has half a mind to ask her if they’ll ever go away, but she likely doesn’t even know herself, and he doesn’t want to upset her further—no matter what she says she feels—by asking anything more about the situation, but his eyes light on something else, and—</p><p>“They ditched the piercings, too?”</p><p>She glances down at her navel, like she somehow hadn’t noticed even though she’s just gotten out of the shower. He wonders if it’s reassuring for her to look, to see the reality of her body, when it’s been only a few days at most. Hell, he doesn’t even know when exactly she’d woken up. “Yeah,” she says, gesturing to her ears. “<em>All</em> of them. Like they couldn’t afford a few pairs of earrings after spending millions of credits piecing me back together.”</p><p>“Just earrings?” He raises an eyebrow, hoping that maybe he’s hit on something that will lighten the mood. They’re still being eavesdropped on, after all. And if he can figure out a way to tell her, without letting Cerberus in on it, <em>just</em> how glad he is to see her again, or how much it all hurt without her, he’ll do it. This is a language they both speak.</p><p>“Fuck off,” she tells him, but again, there’s no real malice behind it. They look at each other for a minute—sizing each other up, like they had when the first met, and they <em>are</em> meeting for the first time, in a way. But he knows her, knows the exact color she dyes her hair and how she looks when she smiles—a <em>real</em> smile, not the bullshit she gives everyone else—and she’s there. Like the past two years never happened.</p><p>“You—”</p><p>His voice is choked, and he stops before he embarrasses himself. Like she wants to deal with this right now, he thinks, but she smiles a little bit—the real one—and pushes herself up from where she’s been leaning against the door. “Me.”</p><p>It’s too much and not enough all at once, and part of him wishes the rest of the old crew were here so that he wouldn’t be the only one under her scrutiny. On the other hand—no one on the SR1 had known how close they were. <em>Are</em>, he hopes. Their friendship had always been just for them, and they’d liked it that way; they’re both intensely private people to begin with, and that’s what makes this so hard.</p><p>He pushes himself up out of the chair, intending to excuse himself under the guise of letting her rest, but she steps forward at the same time, and before he has a chance to realize what’s happening she’s got her arms wrapped around him, her grip both gentle and firm. He returns the gesture without thinking. He’s tall enough in comparison that her forehead comes to his chin and part of his face is pressed to her hair, and she smells like the kind of standard-issue soap she wouldn’t have touched with a ten-foot pole back on the SR1 and—</p><p>It’s her. She’s here. He doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to it.</p><p>“So,” he says after she pulls back, looking anywhere but directly at him. “To Omega?”</p><p>The smile again, softer and shorter than before. She’s already starting to bite at her lip, the gesture its own kind of reassurance. “To Omega.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>there's literally so much going on here that i don't know where to start dalkjflk</p><p>i never thought celia would be very self-conscious or think much about her body at all in me1, but after being reconstructed it would be on her mind a lot, especially if there was physical evidence (besides the scars) that she was changed. like, leaving her hair its natural color is one thing, straightening her teeth is another. also i have no explanation for why they did that other than for Plot Angst Reasons so we're just going to go with it aldakfj</p><p>also i personally thought the fact that shep goes back specifically to save him wasn't ever really acknowledged/talked about (unless i missed something, which is entirely possible) and i wanted to try and remedy that. i definitely think joker would be carrying around some heavy survivor's guilt - and of course whether or not he says that would depend on his relationship with shepard, but for celia it feels wrong to just. leave all of that unsaid.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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